Paul Berman rides into battle

Oflife

Problem is, Britain is so dumbed down, (the whole ship is low in the water, so even the captain is clueless), non of this makes any sense to those who are supposed to defend our freedoms. There is that expression, History repeats itself. The problem is, that was 60 years ago and the Eloi are unaware of said history so cannot spot the parallels and just don't care. How depressing is that?

gareth

There are so many good books about the 'left-liberal-progressive' intelligentsia these days it's hard to keep up. I've gone in the last 4 or 5 years from being someone who might pick up Time magazine in the airport or watch some BBC or CNN news, or indeed catch an Al Gore or David Cameron movie to being in a subculture of people who can't abide their doublespeak anymore.

On a brighter note - the internet and it's global 'cross pollination' is producing so many exciting and quality developments amongst individuals in every field of human endeavour that the corporate control freaks and do-gooders of the tenured 'elite' are going to lose out - at some point, to market forces.

Christopher Horner's book "Power Grab" about green (proxy for red these days) issues is fantastic, and also I recommend Michelle Malkin's book on Obama and his astonishingly corrupt cronies - the truth is stranger than fiction. She is of Filipino extraction and quite small, pretty and petite but she packs a hell of a punch - (unlike Paxman and Peston who leave you none the wiser after hundreds of pages)

Maddy1

To take this out of the muslim context altogether but to emphasise MP.'s views in an altogether different way look at the Hindu, Bose. The Fuhrer, sent this young Indian to the Japanese High Command. Those Indians who fought on the Allies side were largely paid to do so. They were mercenaries. Gandhi told his people not to fight, the fascists. Objectively the Indians who fought on the Japanese,killing the British, side were idealists.Scott does argue however that most of the raw indian recruits were politcally ignorant.Indians killed Indians and the Allies,in the Irrawady watershed with gay abandon. Paul Scott covers all this detail, in his books. The amazing thing there is now a road in Delhi named after Bose, who killed so many Indians! If "Operation Zipper" had gone ahead there were would have been so many more deaths added to WW2 total. Like many facets of our society institutions like the War Museum cannot accommodate absolute historical truths.

William Boyd

Well, familiar territory. I don't think I need to bother reading a book to understand Tariq Ramadam is a pious fraud. The pity is that so many indeed apparently do.

But our problem with jihadi fundamentalism lies nevertheless root and branch in the ruthless persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt beginning with Nasser. Many fled to Saudi Arabia and established themselves in the Saudi civil service eventually to ingratiate themselves within the wahabbi sheikhdom (who until that point thoroughly understood that their bread was buttered on the House of Saud side) from which all else flows, including the rise of the Taliban first in Pakistan and then Afghanistan.

We should rememeber that and extract what lessons we can from it of which one I would have thought is that the sort of 'total' war in Afghanistan you advocate will achieve nothing in the long term for our children.

john Norman

Good to learn that the bill to ban the burqa was overwhelmingly passed by the French last night. Let's see if the weak-kneed who pass themselves off as our leaders will do the same. One suspects not.

Carl

I do believe that MP would write a eulogy about the Beano if it ran an anti-Islamic cartoon strip!

Derek Pasquill

The most egregious article about Berman's work is in this month's edition of Foreign Affairs and is by Marc Lynch - a frequent and obstinate apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood.

One of the scandals revealed by Berman is his suspicion that the soi-disant intellectuals such as Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma have not read Tariq Ramadan's works thoroughly and that therefore their praise of this faux-philosopher is based more likely than not on misplaced sentiment and hearsay - the most damning criticisms one could wish to make. Were they to read Ramadan than they would have to be either incredibly stupid or malevolent to reach the conclusions they do about the much-vaunted bridge construction he is supposedly engaged in.

All in all a sorry state of play.

GeoffM

On the broader Islamist issue Melanie, how come the British Government can revoke the British citizenship of Anna Chapman and exclude her from the country without any recourse to the courts to see if her "Human rights" have been infringed and yet the likes of Abu Hamza and many other foreign Islamists continue to hold British citizenship (and "residency", whatever that means) and hide behind Human Rights legislation.

Do you have an insight into this?

Perhaps your husband can give us his views on the apparent anomaly.

GaryO

The islamists/progressives axis is beginning to unravel. Whereas before 9/11, I would have implicitly relied on what I heard or read on BBC, CNN, Guardian etc. now I can see through their agenda, their lies and their doublespeak.

Now I trust no one. Progressives have completely destroyed my trust in press and journalists in general.

hannah

I do believe Carl would reject MP telling him night follows day!

Dan Engolanda

'Terror and Liberalism' is another great book from Paul Berman that should also be required reading. It dissects how all totalitarian regimes attract so many followers and become so deadly despite the core myths of the ideology flying in the face of logic and reason.

Once I've finished 'Islamic Imperialism, a History' by Efraim Karsh I'll get on to this!

ray

Yes, Geoff M, I too, was amused at how quickly we revoked Anna Chapman's British citizenship ! Yes, her punishment may be due. But no more due than the hordes of Muslim here who abuse our hospitality ! Once again, we go foe easy targets, whilst ignoring the REAL enemy within !

Shaun Harbord

Derek Pasquill
July 14th, 2010 8:56am - Thanks for the refernce to Marc Lynch's article on Berman's book in Foreign Affairs. It's available free online and without registration, let alone subscription.

If people read it they will find, I hope, that, far from being "egregious," it is actually another expose of Berman, a well-known fanatic and charlatan. Still, thanks to you, people can make up their own minds about Ramadan, Berman, Phillips, you and me. Who could possibly object to that?

Jez

maddy.

That is one of the best posts i've read on blog. Absolutely factual and in context with the surrounding situation of the time...... I always wonder how many seconds Ghandi would have wanted Britain to 'un-quit' India once the Japenese took over.

Mr. Mabutoh Afunfa

Islamists will never change even if they wear westernized clothing or the council give them expensive flat costs £8000 a month in Royal Brought of Kensington and Chelsea because their belief and teaching come first.

Sam ARMSTRONG

gareth - I agree with you about Michelle Malkin, she is absolutely fantastic and like Ann Coulter, totally confuses and strikes fear into the heart of the left by combining pretty, feminine looks with a razor sharp wit and fierce intelligence. Malkin as you say is an immigrant, and so completely blows out the water the theory that ethnics in America don't vote for the Republican Party.

just Louise

The Engaging with the Islamic World dhimmis at the FO and their governmental and BBC equivalents should be force fed Bermans's book.

Derek Pasquill

No, Harbord.

What Berman does is show that it is writers such as Lynch, Buruma, Garton Ash who remain fanatical in their inability to confront Islamists:

their inability to call out the genocidal sympathies of people like Qaradawi for example;

or the inability to mention Hitler as if this is somehow verboten in polite discourse, but in the context of this debate, to omit it signals bad faith;

and on and on and on: a mind-numbing catalogue of omissions, bumbles and obfuscations.
(See Berman's reply to his critics at http://tinyurl.com/2wgx6bv)

What could possibly account for this flight or fear of the intellectuals?

As Berman has pointed out - Islamic terrorism and the unimaginable rise of Islamism in the past few decades, fuelled by petro-dollars.

Just because we close our eyes, this does not mean the Muslim Brotherhood will go away.

Augustus

People can so easily tend to forget the outright despotism of minorities who are resistant to assimilation if it isn't coupled with an extra-territorial status and special dispensations. The result is that nations are created within nations, which, for example, feel Muslim before they feel British, or Canadian, or Dutch.
Here identity wins out over nationality. And under the guise of respecting specificity individuals become imprisoned in an ethnic or racial definition, and plunged back into the restrictive mould from which they were supposedly in the process of being freed. Black people, Arabs, Pakistanis,
Muslims, all are imprisoned in their history, and assigned, as in former colonial days, to residence in their epidermis and their beliefs. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in her autobiography: "I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and marriage, for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gawdy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values."

In our new modern age, in the new 'enlightenment', religious and regional minorities (perhaps out of consideration for all the past abuses they are deemed to have suffered) are
being independently set up in which the most outrageous patriotism is passed off as nothing more than the expression of legitimate self-esteem. Instead of celebrating freedom's power to escape determinism, repetition of the past is being encouraged, reinforcing again the power of collective coercion over private individuals. Marginal groups now form a kind of ethos
police, a flag-waving micro-nationalism which certain countries unfortunately see fit to publicly support. Under the guise of celebrating diversity,
veritable ethnic prisons are established where one group of citizens is effectively denied the advantages accorded to others.

It is, apparently, not enough that people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali
have to live like recluses, threatened with having their throats slit by radicals, and surrounded by bodyguards. They also have to endure being ridiculed by high-minded Western
idealists and armchair philosophers. Thus, the defenders of liberty are labelled Fascists, while the real fanatics are portrayed as victims.

PW Virginia USA

The Mid-east was the unfinished business of WW2, the last front...The war quickly left that area after the defeat of Rommel...That the allies didn't return to it was only because the Arabs are so weak and the relief of Germany's defeat left everyone war weary...At least the countries in South America didn't advertise that they were hiding Nazi war criminals, unlike Egypt and Syria...

Derek Pasquill

An article by Lee Harris for the Policy Review, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, "Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals" is pertinent to this debate:

the power of the Tea Party movement grows in inverse proportion to the ability of a society's intellectuals to provide clear and honest responses to the problems they address.

All that is required is an uncouth attitude fuelled by a legitmate anger at the fact that these intellectuals just don't get it.

So push off Lynch, Buruma, Garton Ash and your "polite company" supporters - you are an embarrassment to the civilization which has created you, but you do not appear to have the stomach for the fight to defend it.

article here http://tinyurl.com/26pmqjg

C.Gee

William Boyd:

"But our problem with jihadi fundamentalism lies nevertheless root and branch in the ruthless persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt beginning with Nasser."

No. This sort of muddle-headed history is the problem.

1. Despotisms persecute dissent and difference. Nasser persecuted anyone he deemed a threat to his power. See the history of Jews in Egypt.

2. The Muslim Brotherhood's ideology is itself totalitarian. Wherever it has taken power, it persecutes, like communism.

3. Why should persecution of some groups result in those groups becoming mass murderers and enslavers, while persecution of other groups does not?

4. Bernard Lewis on the understanding of "freedom" in the Arabic/Muslim world is enlightening.

5. The political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is Islamic-Nazism. Even if allowed a space to bustle in, by its own terms it must spread. By its own terms it must suppress and persecute.

6. Look where tolerance of radical Islam in its midst has taken the Western world. Look at what it has done to free speech.

We allow the "problem" of totalitarianism to be defined by sociologists at our peril.

Annie Loyedeer

gareth - it's a lonely place this sub culture that you speak of. Most people fall for the double speak. I'm reading Victor Davis Hanson 'carnage and culture' which is rather more optimistic.

Comprehensiveboy

Of topic but as far as I know that spy woman was not convicted of anything in a court of law and HAD UK citizenship by marriage. (I understand this is fairly prevalent.) Well, she's been stripped of her citizenship pronto hasn't she? Surely some mistake? She fell foul of the Americans I believe. Cough.. cough.... Oh Sharmi? Sharmi? I can't think where that lady has got to can you? I understand this spy lady was of European descent and heritage and in the service of a major European power. I suppose some people are just less equally British by marraige than others these days. Now, had she been a resident, maybe it would be different.... even without the citizenship.

Lynn Johnston

Paul Berman's book "Terror and Liberalism" is also excellent in the way it makes the thinking of Qutb clear to the western public and one can see it exerts the same sort of pull for educated Muslims as Communism did in the west. The ideology of Qutb needs to be made clear to the western public.

Another great book that makes the roots of the Nazi influence in the Middle East clear is Bernard Lewis's "Semites and Anti Semites".

Margaret Muller-Johansson

Augustus I agree with everything you wrote.

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Wonder where Harold, Richard, Linda, Stephan, Dale are when you need their unsurpassed incisiveness..

Mmmm...on the Libyan Peace ship, I guess...

In the Widerness in America

Augustus

You have written wisely and with psychological and historical accuracy about this topic. Identity trumps nationality as Bernard Lewis, the Princeton Islam scholar, also stated. As for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she is a true hero for her courage in defending freedom. The fact that she has to have bodyguards on a continual basis for speaking the truth is a grim reminder of the violent and irrational times we live in.

Fabio P.Barbieri

al Banna's admiration for Mussolini does not seem to have taken into account the slaughter of 30,000 Senussi Muslims in Libya in the thirties, ordered (and rejoiced in) by Mussolini himself. The Senussis were no angels and had given the Italian government plenty of trouble, but their massacre was a war crime by any standard, and should have outraged any other Muslims. However, it would seem that Al Banna was so entranced by Mussolini's tribalism and hatred of democracy that he was willing to overlook any such little problems.

john Norman

This book should be sold as a package with Julien Benda's pre-war "Les trahison des clercs". Despairingly, one cannot see any future for Europe- and perhaps, North America other than the bloodiest of civil wars.

Noah Aaron Bashi

Fabio P.Barbieri, I don't get it why only mention Arab African countries when many people suffered under the Mussolini fascist government? Okay, how about mentioning other things he did to Africa for example murdering and trying to slave the farmers in Southern Somalia, trying to take over Eritrea, he also tried Ethiopia but didn't succeed after the 8 hours war we all know that the Italians lost it, anyhow where did this come from that Mussolini slaughter 30,000 Libyans in the thirties? If Mussolini did this it is wrong but we have to know the Islamist fanatics been killing and victimizing more then millions of people included their own muslim people since the 7th century.

Wilbert Friesen

In Holland we kicked him out of the office.
Ramadan refused to condemn the stoning of women.
But our multiculti's stood behind him 'till the end.
But in the Netherlands (but also France, Danmark) the multiculti's are losing ground fast.
I don't have high hopes for the U.K. though.
You have 3 multiculti parties (and a multiculti BBC) and one racist one (BNP).
Not much choice.

'le England is dying for the second time.